Soldiers alld States ill 1990 '93
assisted them actively, lending experts, models, training-programs, and funds,
7 declared that:
Soldiers and States III 1990
POLITICAL MISDEVELOPMENT
As recencly as twenty years ago, many scholars thought that Third World states
would recapitulate the Western experience of state formation. The idea of
"political development," now largely abandoned, epitomized the conception of
a standard track along which states could roll toward the terminus of full
participation and effectiveness - the model of participation and effectiveness
being, of course, one or another of the existing \Vestern states. The confidence
of political developmentalists shattered with the emergence of clear alternative
models such as China, Japan, Korea, and Cuba, the embarrassing failure of
existing development schemes to anticipate the actual experiences of Third
World states, resistance by Third, World leaders and scholars to the
condescension of Western academic advice, turns to Realpolitik in the great
powers' treatment of Third World states, and disputes among Western scholars
themselves as to the proper reading of past experience (see Evans and Stephens
1989). Along with "modernization'" "educational development," and other
well-meaning but obfuscatory. slogans, political development is fast disappearing
from the analytical lexicon.
As misconceived as the old analyses now seem, it was not utterly stupid to
suppose that 000- Western states would undergo some of the same experiences
as their Western counterparts and end up looking much more like them. As
recent colonies of various Western powers, a majority of newly independent
states began their careers with formal organizations traced on Western lines
and incorporating significant parts of the colonial apparatus. Western-educated
state leaders' sought self-consciously to install administra...tions, parliaments,
parties, armies, and public services of Western inspiration.
What is more, they said so; Third World leaders declared that they would
modernize their countries, develop them politically. Major Western powers
So long as Japan was reeling from its losses in World War II and China
was consumed with its internal struggles, no other models were obviously
available. The choices seemed to run from Soviet-type socialism to American-
style capitalism, with no viable paths of state formation beyond cither extremc.
The entire range recapitulated onc- version or another of European-
American experience. Speaking of Southeast Asia in '960, Lucian Pye
the dominant theme of Southeast Asia is the effort of the leaders of these new countries
to create modern nation-states out of their transitional societies. These leaders have
committed their peoples to the task of establishing representative institutions of
government and developing more productive modes of economic life. Although
enthusiasm for these goals has not been lacking, it is difficult to estimate their chances of
being realized, for it is still hard to discern even the outlines of the political and social
systems that are evolving in Southeast Asia. The possibility of failure is great, and
leaders and citizens can be troubled with self-doubts. Already the tendency toward more
authoritarian practices is widespread: for example, armies are coming to play roles that «
were originally rese'rved for democratic politicians.
(Pye '960' 65-6)
Note the language: it speaks of constructing something whose characteristics
are well kno,\,n in a situation that is poorly understood, and menacing to the
enterprise, The "something" to construct was an effective national state on a
Western design. To be sure, Pye saw the possibility that something quite
different might emerge in Southeast Asia, even that Southeast Asian leaders
might press for something different. Most leaders of newly independent states
actually declared that they sought a third way, at least vaguely socialist,
somewhere between the American Scylla and the Russian Charybdis. But the
existing Western states defined the range of choice. With varying degrees of
dogmatism and perspicacity, political developmentalists said exactly that.
Even historically sophisticated analysts such as Cyril Black promulgated
models featuring successive stages of political development. Black distinguished
no fewer than seven different concrete paths of modernization) those illustrated
by the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium, Uruguay, Russia, Algeria,
and Liberia, in that order (Black 1966: 90-4). But he argued that all his varied
instances passed through four stages: a challenge of modernity, a consolidation
of modernizing leadership, an economic and social transformation, and then
the integration of society. Previous history, in his analysis, affected exactly how
any particular society faced these challenges. But eventually all the European
cases he examined arrived at something like societal integration after crossing
the three previous thresholds in the same order.
The plausible collective reasoning had a great flaw. It supposed that a single
standard process of state formation existed, that each state passed through the
same internal process more or less separately, that Western experience
'94 Soldiers and States in J990
exemplified the process, that contemporary Western states had generally
reached the end of the process, and that the problem was one of social
engineering on a very large scale. The etTort to put those suppositions to the
tcst in the construction oflo'modern" African, Asian, Latin American, or Middle
Eastern states immediately raised doubts. Major powerholders resisted or
distorted the transformation of existing governmental organization, officials
used state power for their own ends, political parties became vehicles of ethnic
blocs or patron-client chains, state-led enterprises collapsed, charismatic
leaders suppressed Western-style electoral politics, and many more features of
Third World states challenged the Western models.
Western models? In fact, the standard treatments of "political development"
also misconstrued the Western experience on which they ostensibly drew. On
the whole, they presented it as a conscious problem-solving process that passed
through a series of standard internally-generated stages and finally produced
mature, stable states. For A.F.K. Organski (1965: 7), the stages were:
the politics of primitive unification;
2 the politics of industrialization;
3 the politics of national welfare;
4 the politics of abundance.
Organski's characteristic scheme compressed a great deal of Third World
experience into its first stage, but then delineated a path that clearly led toward
the existing European world and its extensions.
Similarly, a great many political analysts thought that the transition to
modernity passed from one condition of equilibrium - traditional society, or
something of the sort - to another, superior, modern equilibrium. In between,
according to this line of argument, lay the turbulence of rapid social change.
Because social change was occurring much more rapidly in the twentieth
century than before, new states were experiencing greater stresses than their
European predecessors. Thus Third World states ran the risk of simultaneous
foreign and domestic conflict, each stimulating the other (see Wilkenfeld 1973).
Eventually, however, they would learn to contain conflict and achieve stable
government of a modern kind. So, at least, taught much of the literature on
political development.
. Since the 1960s, a clearer reading of Western has made the
inadequacy of those suppositions obvious. This book has borrowed greedily
from the subsequent fund of knowledge, and has reinvested the ·accumulation
in a reinterpretation of Western states' history. In earlier chapters, we have seen
how widely the trajectories of European state formation varied as a function of
the geography of coercion and capital, the organization of major powerholders,
and pressure from other states. We have examined how a long series of unequal
struggles among rulers, other powerholders, and ordinary people created
Soldiers and States in 1990 195
specific state institutions and claims on the state. We have noticed how much
the eventual organizational convergence of European states resulted from
competition among them, both within Europe and in the rest of the world. We
have witnessed the profound impact of war, and preparation for war, on other
features of state structure. All these observations lead to the conclusions -
vague but helpful - that Third World state formation should be distinctiyely
dEferent, and that the changed relations between coercion and capital should
provide clues as to the nature of that ditTerence.
• In what ways should contemporary experience ditTer from that of the
European past? After centuries of divergences among capital-intensive,
coercion-intensive, and capitalizcd·cocrcion paths of state formation, European
states began to converge a few centuries ago; war and mutual influence caused
ihe convergence. Although shared colonial experience imposed common
properties on many Third World states, however, no great homogenization has
so far occurred among them. On the contrary. Any student of European state
formation can hardly help noticing the variety of today's Third World states.
Variety marks any category that includes both immense, ancient China and tiny,
brand-new Vanuatu, both wealthy Singapore and dirt-poor Chad; we ar.e
unlikely to generalize successfully about such a heterogeneous set of
experiences. Not all the states of the Third World, furthermore, are "new"
states, by any stretch of the imagination. China and )apaJ:stand among the
world's oldest continuously existing states, SiamlThaiiand is centuries old, and
most Latin American states acquired formal independence during the
Napoleonic Wars. They stand with states formed since 1945 chiefly in their
recent acquisition of full membership in the state system that European
struggles created and defined.
-
Look more closely, however: exactly what is heterogeneous about Third //
World states? Not so much their organizational structures as relations between
,
citizens and states. Formal organizational characteristics of the world's states
have, in fact, converged dramatically over the last century or so; the adoption of
one Western model or another has become a virtual prerequisite for recognition
by-prior members of the state system. The present 160-odd recognized states
cover a much narrower organizational range than the 200-odd European states
of 1500, which included city-states, city-empires, federations, kingdoms,
territorial empires, and more. Except for relatively centralized federations and
quite attenuated kingdoms, those once-abundant political forms have all but
disappeared. After 'SOD, both the pressures of large-scale warmaking and the
negotiations of large-scale peacemaking drove all European states toward a
ne'; organizational form: the national state. The drift from "internal" to
"external" state formation which prevailed in Europe has continued into our
own time, and imposed a common definition on states in very diverse parts of
the world. Contemporary stare structures, in the narrow sense, resemble each
other in featuring courts, legislatures, central bureaucracies, field administrations,
196 Soldiers alld States ill 1990
standing armies, specialized police forces, and a panoply of public services;
even the differences among socialist, capitalist, and mixed economics fail to
override these common properties.
Vet such formally similar organizations do not work at all in the same
manner. The differences lie in both the internal operation of superficially
indistinguishable courts, legislatures, bureaux, or schools and the relations
between governmental agencies and citizens. In the European experience,
states took forms that mediated between the exigencies of external war and the
elaims of the subject population; to some degree, each state's organization
adapted to local social and economic conditions. As existing national states
sculptured newcomers in their own image, local adaptation occurred instead in
relations between citizens and states. These days the difference between
coercion-intensive, capital-intensive, and capitalized-coercion settings affects
the formal structure of states much less than it used to, but affects relations
between citizens and states even more. In that regard, the contemporary world
remains extremely diverse.
Does the Third World exist? Certainly Latin American, Middle Eastern, and
East Asian states differ greatly with respect both to internal organization and to
position within the world system of states. The justification for beginning with
such a crude, composite category rests on the fact that states in lower-income
regions of the world have long endured under the formal control of Europe and
its extensions, have commonly adopted European or American models of
formal organization, find themselves caught in superpower struggles over which
they can exert Iirtle control, and constitute an uneasy but recurrent pool for
alliances with newcomers to the state system (Ayoob t989)' In extending to the
non-European world, the state system did not simply remain the same; the
entrance of scores of independent states from Asia, Africa, and Latin America
transformed the system in ways that a comparison with previous European
experience can illuminate.
We still have something to gain, then, from the comparison of contemporary
Third World e>.perience with that of national states for which a long record is
already available. At a that comparison will help us take two useful
steps: (I) to discard ideas about state formation that have already proven
themselves faulty before wasting time applying them to Gontemporary
experience; (2) to sharpen our sense of what is distinctive, and what familiar, in
the processes of state formation, transformation, and deformation now
occurring in the poorer parts of the world. '
Reflecting on European expericnce, what might we expect to find happening
in the contemporary world? Given the divcrsity of state formation within
Europe, wc have no reason to anticipate a single trajectory of chaoge. But we
might reasonably extrapolate from Europe to:
influence of the rdative distributions of coercion and capital on
the paths of state formation;
Soldiers alld Slates ill 1990 197
distinctively different directions of change in the presence and absence of
significant clusters of cities;
strong effects of war and preparation for war on the creation and alteration
of state structure;
mediation of those effects through (a) fiscal structure and (b) the sources of
arms and military personnel;
civilianization of state power through the creation of central bureaucracies,
increasing reliance on credit and taxation for the purchase of military
means, and bargaining with the subject population over those mean.;
continuation of the trend from "internal" to "external" determination of
the organizational forms of states.
In a world so different from that in which most European states took shape, to
be sure, these remain no more than orienting hypotheses. Vet they improve
considerably on the old notion that Third World states would somehow
recapitulate the idealized experience of the most effective Western national
states.
THE IMPACT AND HERtTAGE OF WORLD WAR II
What, then, distinguishes state formation in the contemporary world from its
counterparts in the past? Although twentieth-century war takes a deadlier toll
than ever, war has changed significantly in character. civjl wars,
often aided and abetted by great powers, have become much more common in
the world since 1945 than they were in European experience. The threat of
miclear arms and other technical menaces has compounded the likely costs of a
major war. The formation of a bipolar state system on a, nearly global scale
affected the politics, and the military prospects, of most states. On the principle
that the number of relations among states increases geometrically as the
nUI1.!.ber of states increases arithmetically, the sheer proliferation of connected
but nominally independent states greatly complicated the state system.
World War 11 transformed the state system and the states within it. As
citizens of belligerent states, as inhabitants of battle zones, or both, most of the
world's people felt the war's impact. The war broke all records for killing, for
destruction of property, and for displacement of populations. By dropping
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States introduced into
warfare the first weapons in history with the potential to annihilate all humanity
in a few days.
We can reasonably place the start of World War II in 1938 (when Japan and
Russia began to fight while Germany annexed Poland and dismembered
Czechoslovakia) or in 1939 (when Germany invaded Poland and then the rest
of Czechoslovakia). In either case,Japan's surrender in 1945 marks a relatively
198 Soldiers aIld States ill 1990
neat end to the war. Perhaps fifteen million deaths in battle and another twenty-
five million as a direct result of war made World War II by far the most
destructive belligerency in human history. Powers sustaining at least a thousand
battle deaths ineluded Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada,
Ethiopia, Poland, USA, USSR, Belgium, Brazil, China, Yugoslavia, the
Netherlands, Rumania, [taly, New Zealand, France, South Africa, Greece,
Norway, Mongolia, Japan, Germany, Hungary, and Finland (Small and Singer
198z: 91). The war left Japan, important parts of China, and much of Europe
devastated.
As the war ended, two states towered over all the rest: the USA and the
USSR. The United States had suffered relatively light losses (408 thousand
battle deaths as compared, for instance, with Germany's 3.5 million) during
World War II but had mobilized enormous industrial capacity after a
debilitating depression. [t is not surprising that the United States, an industrial
colossus grown even more muscular in war, seized a dominant position in the
world system of states. The rise of the Soviet Union is the greater puzzle. The
USSR had endured terrible privations in the war (7.5 million battle deaths,
perhaps zo million in total fatalities, and 60 percent of industrial capacity lost)
but had built up a formidable state organization in the process (Rice 1988). No
doubt that enhanced state capacity, and the of Soviet control to other
eastern European states, helps account for the other pole of the bipolar world.
Almost immediately the former allies turned to an enmity that blocked a general
peace settlement for the first time in four centuries. As a result, losers of the
war such as Japan and Germany long endured the victors' military occupation,
and only slowly regained membership in the state system. In fact, the victors
and the vanquished only settled the war piecemeal, in occupations, provisional
international agreements, partial treaties, and de facto recognitions. The war's
complexity and scale, plus its bipolar outcome, overwhelmed the capacity of the
international system to produce the sort of general settlement tllat had ended
major European wars since 1503.
The postwar process of state formation distinguished itself from its
predecessors especially in th.e wholesale transformation of Western colonies
into formally independent states. The situation favored European withdrawal:
the USSR had no colonies in the major areas of European colonization, and the
United States had few, while the European powers were preoccupied with
recovery from the ravages of war. At a dizzying pace, dependencies. demanded
and won recognition as autonomous entities. [n 1960 alone the Belgian Congo
(now ZaIre), Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the
Congo, Cyprus, Gabon, Cote d'[voire, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria,
Senegal, Somalia, Togo and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) all joined the
United Nations shortly after receiving recognition as independent states.
At the same time the Soviet Union and, especially, the United States,
extended the networks of their military bases, military assistance programs, and
Soldiers allil States ill /990 199
intelligence facilities throughout the world (Eden 1988). In East Asia, for
example, the United States substituted its own military power for that of a
demilitarized Japan, reorganized and ran the South Korean military, and
subsidized China's KMT forces both in their losing mainland battles and in
their retreat to control of Taiwan (Cumings 1988, Dower '988, Levine
Between 1945 and 1984, furthermore, the United States pumped billion of
military-economic aid into South Korea and another $5.6 billion into Taiwan,
as compared with a total for all Africa of $6.89 billion and all Latin America of
$14.8 billion (Cumings 1984: Z4).
For the most part, European powers relinquished their overlordships with
remarkably little travail. With the exception of the Algerian struggle for
independence and the early stages of the Indochinese conflicts, the bitterest
battles occurred where more than one group claimed the right to rule the new
state, where a segment of the liberated population demanded its own state, and
where the division among the claimants incited extensive great power
interventionj China, Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Borneo, Korea,
Vietnam, the Philippines, Ruanda, Angola, and Mozambique provide the
obvious examples. The United Nations undertook to register and manage the
entry of new members into the international system of states.
For the period since 1945, we can therefore take the membership of the
United Nations at any point in time as an approximation of the world's state
system. The approximation is imperfect: Switzerland, South Korea, North
Korea, Taiwan, Monaco, Tuvalu, and a few other units behave like states but
do not belong, while the Byelorussian and Ukrainian republics (until the recent
stirrings of nationalism, wholly owned subsidiaries of the USSR) belong as
concessions to the power the Soviet Union wielded at the end of World War II.
But in general, the organization includes the world's important states, and has
absorbed new states as they have achieved a measure of autonomy in
international affairs.
Figure 7. [ presents the geographic distribution of UN members from the
organization's founding in 1945 to 1988. The story is obvious: the UN started
.out-with a large majority of states from Europe and the Americas - the old
European state system and its extensions, minus the major losers of World War II
and plus a few important states outside of the West. The numbers of states
from Europe and the Americas increased modestly as European peace
settlements fell into place and as Caribbean states began acquiring independence
and international recognition. But after 1955 Asian states entered the UN at a
faster rate than those of the West. From 1960 onward African states dominated
the new entries.
The new entrants, on the average, were following coercion-intensive paths to
statehood. The departing colonial powers left little accumulated capital behind
them, but bequeathed to their successor states military forces drawn from and
modeled on the repressive forces tlley had previously established to maintain
zoo Soldier> alld Slales i/l 1990 Soldiers a/ldSlales i/l 1990 ZOI
180
170
military aid from great powers, furthermore, the arm'ed forces enjoyed
KEY ... Africa
160 £ insulation from reliance on taxation and conscriptiOl,l authorized by civilian
• Asia/Pacific
150 governments.
, Europe
140 How far the miJitary of countries were able to maintain autonomy,
130 o Americas
however, depended on the alliances they formed (or failed to form) with
(Jl 120
$ 110 elements of the ruling class, and on the success of the export program. In
E5 100 Bolivia, the encapsulation of tin tycoons, who lived handsomely on export
'0 90 income and established few strong ties within the country, made them
(j; 80
vulnerable to military seizure of state power and of tin revenues (Gallo 1985).
70
In Taiwan, a quintessential police state under JiangJie-Shi (Chiang Kai-Shek),
60 ++-+-H-+-+-+-........H-+-++-+-VH-"'-++-+-+-<-+-l--H-++-H
50 r the great success of the industrial export program eventually diverted the
40-tA-++-++-++-+--f military from their preparations to invade the Chinese mainland, reduced their
30 e--a-aaaBasae
20 B B B B B e-e B B B B control over policy and day-to-day governmental operations, and surrounded
10 them with powerful civilian officials (Amsden '985).
0+rTTrrrnrnTTTTrrrnn-rTTTTrrrrrrrTT-rT,-,-rrrr-, What is more, the character of war changed significantly after '945. Despite
1949 1954 1959 1964 1969 1974 1979 1984 the near-disappearance of wars among Western powers, lethal combat actually
became more frequent in the world as a whole. Table 7.1 shows the trend since
Figure 7.1 Membership ofUniled Nalions by geographic reb';on, 1945-88.
J ,893, e''Pressed as thousands of banle deaths in wars involving at least a
thousand battle deaths in a given year. The totals fluctuate sharply from one
period to the next. Yet the figures show several trends clearly: the concentration
their own local administrations. Relativcly well equipped and trained armed of deaths in the periods of general war, the stabilization or decline of
forces then specialized in control of civilian populations and in combat against "extrasystemic" wars as more and more states entered the international state
insurgents rather than interstate war. Once Europeans dismantled their own system) the irregularly increasing prominence of civil wars as the origin of
governmental apparatus, the armed forces, the churches, and Western deaths in battle. The number of new civil wars rose from about ten thousand
corporations were frequently the most effective organizations operating in the battle deaths per year at the century's start to a ,hundred tllOusand deaths per
state's territory. The armed forces, furthermore, had some distinctive year between 1937 and '947, then fluctuated around the hundred-thousand
characteristics: their senior ranks filled rapidly with men who had previously mark over the next three decades.
occupied subordinate positions in colonial armies. Often, continuing a pattern With the twentieth century, battle deaths underestimated more and more the
of recruitment established by colonial powers, they drew disproportionately on damage done by war. The bombing and shelling of civilian settlements
one linguistic, religious, and/or regional population, and therefore became the
instrument or the site of sharp ethnic rivalries. Up to 1966, for example, the Table 7.1 Battle deaths in wars involving at least a thousand battle dealhs in a given
Nigerian army held itself al09f from manifest division by region or ethnicity. yCal', 1893-1980
But with the military coup d'etat of January 1966, fissures began to show. In
Locus of war
July, a coalition of officers from the north led another coup, and acted quickly to
expel Ibos (who came especially from Nigeria's Eastern Region) from the army Period ImcrsI3tc Extrasyslcmalic Civil TOlal Perccnt civil
and power. Soon (May 1967) the east, as Biafra, broke into open rebellion, and
18 93- 1 9°3 30 96 "2 238 47·1
one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars began (Luckham 1971: 17-8z): 19°4- 19 1 4 8.860 0 270 9,13 0 3. 0
Except where charismatic national leaders deliberately held them in check, 19'5- 19 25 161 83 5 06 75 0 67,S
Third World armies commonly resisted civilian control. Senior officers '9 26- 193 6 21 3 0 955 1,168 81.8
1 937- 1947 16,29 2 100 l,t61 17,553 6,6
frequently felt, and said, that they knew better than mere politicians :what ti,e 194 8- 1 95 8 1,9 13 59 37 2 2,344 15.9
country's destiny required, and how to maintain order on the way to fulfilling 1959- 1969 1,25° 0 1,83 0 3,080 59·4
that destiny. To the extent that their states generated revenues by selling 1970-1980 78 73 820 92< 89. 0
commodities on the international market, bought arms overseas, and received Source: Small and Singer 1982: 134,263
 202 Soldiers alld Statcs ill 1990
destroyed increasing numbers of non-combatants, not to mention their means
of livelihood. During and after wars, states began to displace or even expel
populations as never before. And the deliberate attempt to kill entire
populations - genocide and politicide - has turned from the rare, appalling
aberration that it once seemed to a standard technique of government. Between
1945 and 1987, deliberate mass killing of civilians by agents of states probably
caused from 7 million to 16 million deaths throughout the world, more than
died in the direct engagements of international and civil wars (HarlT and Gurr
1988).
Civil wars that occurred after 1945 sometimes arose from general struggles
among classes for state power. More often they sprang from the claims of
particular religious, linguistic, and territorial groups for autonomy or for control
of an existing state. In this limited sense, nationalism has become more salient
in wars as the world as a whole has settled into a complete map of stable,
mutually-exclusive state territories; the powerholders of excluded nationalities
see their chances slipping away from them.
At the same time, great powers have intervened increasingly in civil wars,
seeking alignment and cooperation of those who control the state by assuring
that the sympathetic faction wins. During the 1970s, substantial civil wars
began in Angola, Burundi, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon,
Nicaragua, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rhodesia, and Sri Lanka; in only one of
them (Guatemala) did outside powers refrain from intervening in a substantial
way (Duner 1985: 140). When 1980 ended, wars were raging in the Philippines,
Angola, Guatemala, Afghanistan, EI Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia,
Mozambique, and Peru. In most of these cases, the United States, the Soviet
Union, or South Africa was at least marginally involved. Although the 1980s
offered some respite by comparison with previous decades, the destructiveness
of the Iran-Iraq war (perhaps a million battle deaths) and the continuation of
other struggles into the decade makes it unlikely that the completion of the next
interval in 1991 will establish a downward trend.
Available weaponry promised new levelsofdestructiveness, as the proliferation
of nuclear arms threatened the whole world with extinction. At the moment, the
USA, the USSR, the United Kingdom, France, China, and India definitely
have their own nuclear weapons. In addition to them, West Germany, Israel,
Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, and Japan are processing plutonium, which brings
them at least within striking distance of nuclear military capacity. ,The other
ostensibly non-nuclear states that did not sign the 1968 nuclear non-
proliferation treaty - and therefore remain active candidates for nuclear
capacity - include Spain, Israel, Chile, Cuba, and South Africa. About 10
percent of the world's recognized states, including its greatest powers, then,
either deploy nuclear arms or retain the right to do so. War will not become
more benign as time goes on. (A. J. P. Taylor ends his otherwise chatty How
War;- Elld with a chilling reminder of the nuclear threat: "However, do not
Soldiers alld States ill 1990 203
worry. The Third World War will be the last": Taylor 1985: 118.) In the
meantime, non-nuclear wars proliferate.
The continued rise ofwar couples with a fixation of international boundaries'
With a few significant exceptions, military conquest across borders has ended,
stales have ceased fighting each other over disputed territory, and border fo""es
have shifted their elTorts from defense against direct attack toward control of
infiltration. Armies (and, for that matter, navies and air forces) concentrate
increasingly on repression of civilian populations, combat of insurgents, ana
seizures of power. As a consequence, governments become more unstable as
their borders become more secure. Because those who control states define
whole populations as their enemies, wars generate refugees at a huge rat'U
(conventional estimates set the number of refugees in tl,e world at 8 million
toward 1970 and 10.5 million toward 1980: Zolberg 1981: 21).
If the end ofWorld War II began a new era for worldwide war and peace, the
1960s brought the largest transition so far within that era. During the early
1960s, decolonization and entry of new states into the international system
accelerated, civil wars greatly increased in destructiveness and in their share of ...
all wars, military power consolidated in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle
East, and military struggles for control of African states multiplied rapidly. The
Cuban missile crisis confirmed the rough strategic equality of the United States
and Soviet Union, as well as stabili2ing their claims to mutually exclusive zones
of influence around their own frontiers. Above all else, military men became
increasingly involved in struggles for state power. Let us therefore focus on the
place of military power in Third World states.
THE ASCENT OF MILITARY MEN
Although writing on the Third World's military was always more tentative and
divided than analyses of political or economic development, there too Western
analysts commonly adopted an implicit model of the "mature" polity. In such a
polity, they supposed, impeccably professional military men occupied a
significant but clearly subordinate place; the model followed directly from the
experience of most European states during the last few centuries of state
formation. The analyst's job was then to chart the path that would or could lead
from the present condition of the military in Indonesia or the Congo to the
condition appropriate for stable democracy. That job entailed the further task
of accounting for deviations from the favored path - in particular, the puzzling
way in which many colonial territories gained formal independence blessed with
ostensibly democratic and representative governments, yet quickly moved to
military rule.
Most analysts thought, with Edward Shils, that "Military rule is one of the
several practicable and apparently stable alternatives when parliamentary,
 204 Soldiers alld Siaies ;111990
democratic regimes falter. The inhcrited and the newly engendered obstaclcs
over which these regimes have been stumbling are more determinative than the
aspirations of the military elitcs of these states, although the latter are not
unimportant" (Shils in Johnson [962: 9). Thus political development and
military development merged into the same problem. Both ideas have now
dissolved in skepticism, contradiction, and despair.
In Third World regions such as Africa and South Asia, a student of Western
history cannot help noticing apparent disjunctions between the existence of
Western-looking twentieth-century armies, on the one hand, and the prevalence
of military politics reminiscent of the Renaissance, between the apparatus of
representative government and the arbitrary use of state power against citizens,
between the installation of apparently conventional bureaucracies and the
Widespread use of governmental organization for individual gain. These
disjunctions are more visible in states that have recently escaped from colonial
rule than in the rest of the Third World. Contrary to the apparent teaching of
European history, the growth ofbig government, arbitrary rule, and militarization
now seem to be going hand in hand.
Thirty years ago, Samuel Huntington argued that civilian conttol over the
military occurred through two different processes, one unstable and one stable.
The unstable process was a power struggle in which one civilian group or
another subordinated the military to a governmental institution, a constitution,
or a particular social class; Huntington gave it the odd name of "subjective"
control. "Objective" control, in his eyes, resulted from maximizing military
professionalism and recognizing an independent military sphere outside of
politics. "Historically," said Huntington, "the demand for objective control has
come from the military profession, the demand for subjective control from the
multifarious civilian groups anxious tO'maximize their power in military affairs"
(Huntington 1957: 84-5). Paradoxically, civilians who sought to increase their
own power by interfering in military professionalization thereby promoted
military seizure of power. A pro-military ideology, low military political power,
and high military professionalism, by this argument, promote civilian control,
while anti-military ideology, .high military political power and low military
professionalism promote military control.
The insertion of military politieal power into the explanation of military
control introduces an element of circularity into the argument, but we can break
the circle by checking the factors Huntington considers to promqte political
power: personal affiliation of the military with other powerful groups, resources
. placed directly under the control of the officer corps, hierarchical interpenetra-
tion'of the officer corps with civilian power structures, prestige and popularity
of the officer 'corps and its leaders. Thus we would expect an officer corps to
have relatively little political power if it rccruited chiefly from outside the ruling
classes, had few non-military resources at its disposal, held few non-military
offices, and had little popular following.
Soldiers alld Siaies i1l1990 205
Huntington wrote in a time of optimism about the professionalization of
Third World armies and the strengthening of civilian control. Five years after
Huntingdon, the Spanish-Mexican writer Victor Alba continued the note of
optimism in his declaration that Latin American militarism:
has arrived at the penultimate phase in its history. In its final stage it will disappear. That
epoch may be near. Encouraged by the increased possibilities of legislative and
diplomatic action and the growing concern of international organizations, powerful
elements in Latin America have made the obliteration of militarism !.heir major
preoccupation.
(Alba in Johnson 1962: 165-6)
The millennium, however, has dragged its feet. Despite dramatic containment
of the military in Brazil and Argentina, the weakening of Chile's Pinochet
regime, and the faltering of Alfredo Stroessner's personalistic rule in Paraguay,
nine of the 24 larger Latin American and Caribbean states still accord extensive
power and autonomy to their armed forces. Behind the scenes, furthermore,
the militaries of South America still constitute a political force to reckon with.
Treated as a prediction made thirty years ago, Huntington's analysis indicates "
that in so far as pro-military ideologies have arisen, military political power has
declined, and military professionalism has increased in different parts of the
world, civilian control should have become more effective. If, on the other
hand, military control has actually become more widespread, then we should
find that anti-military ideologies have gained, military political power has risen,
and military professionalism has declined. Something in those predictions looks
wrong: military control has increased in the world's states over the last thirty
years, but while military political power, by Huntington's standards, has surely
expanded, anti-military ideology does not seem to have become more prevalent,
and military professionalism has almost certainly grown. To clarify what has
happened, we should look at the place of militarizing states in the world's
system of states.
TODAY'S MtLITARY tN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Starting in the sixteenth century and ending only very recently, Western states
incorporated the rest of the world into their system through colonization,
elaboration of commercial tics, and direct negotiation. Most recent entrants
joined the system as independent actors through decolonization, and therefore
arrived with administrative structures, fiscal systems, and armed forces
designed on Western lines; titles, perquisites, and uniforms of the former
colonies reflect those national influences. Yet reproducing a table· of
organization provides no guarantee that the new state will behave like the old.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the behavior of the Third World's military. The
206 Soldiers al1d Stales il1 1990
armies of poor countries resemble those of rich countries in many regards. But
on the whole they intervene in domestic political life far more directly and
frequently, and with more obviously damaging consequences for rights of
citizens. Why should that be?
Think back to the central paradox of European state formation: that the
pursuit of war and military capacity, after having created national states as a sort
of by-product, led to a civilianization of government and domestic politics. That
happened, I have argued, for five main reasons: because the effort to build and
sustain military forces led agents of states to build bulky extractive apparatuses
staffed by civilians, and those extractive apparatuses came to contain and
constrain the military forces; because agents of states bargained with civilian
groups that controlled the resources required for effective warmaking, and in
bargaining gave the civilian groups enforceable claims on the state that further
constrained the military; because the expansion of state capacity in wartime
gave those states that had not suffered great losses in war expanded capacity at
the ends of wars, and agents of those states took advantage of the situation by
taking on new activities, or continuing activities they had started as emergency
measures; because participants in the war effort, including military personnel,
acquired claims on the state that they deferred during the war in response to
repression or mutual consent but which they reactivated at demobilization; and
finally because wartime borrowing led to great increases in national debts,
which in turn generated service bureaucracies and encouraged greater state
intervention in national economies.
In a cartoon history of Europe, the story would appear in four panels. In the
first panel, the king wears armor and carries a sword, recruiting and
commanding his own army and navy, which maintain personal loyalty to his
service. In the second, the king bears glorified military garb, but contracts with
a col1dottiere for the hire of mercenaries to fight his battles. In the third panel,
the king, fined out in a grand costume unerly unsuitable for fighting wars,
consults with generals and ministers of war who find their places in a complex,
civilian-dominated structure. In the last scene we see a king (who may now be a
president or prime minister in.disguise) sporting a business suit and negotiating
not only with his staff but also with duly constituted representatives of major
civilian interests and of the population at large. (The four panels bear the
familiar subtitles Patrimonialism, Brokerage, Nationalization, and Specialization.)
To be sure, the comic-book version of civilianization describes different
national experiences with varying verisimilitude; it fits German experience
better than Dutch or Russian. But it will do as a schematic summary of
civilianization in European states,
Another general feature of European state formation deserves our attention,
Relations with other stntes played a significant part in the formation of any
particular state, if only because wars and war settlements significantly affected
the state's structure and boundaries. Nevertheless, the organizational structures
Soldiers alld Slates ill /990 207
of the first national states to form took shape mainly as a consequence of
struggles between would-be rulers and the people they were trying to rule. As
the European state system solidified, however, whole sets of states began to
decide the outcomes of wars, and therefore the organizational structures of
states that emerged from the wars. Thus Napoleon's forces drastically
reorganized states as they conquered, and the Congress of Vienna redrew the
map to include a previously nonexistent kingdom of the Netllerlands plus a
greatly-reshaped Prussia, Sardinia, Bavaria, Baden, and Austria. Europe moved
from relatively "internal" to relatively "external" processes of state formation.
That shift toward the external continued into the twentieth century. Only a
glance at twentieth-century processes of state formation reveals that they are
triply external: many new national states formed as colonial possessions of other
states, especially European states; many built their governing institutions under
the influence of another, much greater, power; and concerts of nations _ the
United Nations being their latest embodiment - have ratified and to some
extent sustained their existence as separate members of the international state
system. One consequence is a decreasing flexibility of state boundaries in the ,
twentieth century. Except as a part of a general peace settlement negotiated by
many states, it becomes decreasingly likely that conquest will lead to a major
redrawing of any state's perimeter. These days Guatemala claims all of Belize
and Venezuela claims some of Guyana, but other states of the Americas will not
tolerate a territorial grab in either case. Although wars, guerrilla and otherwise,
continue to occur quite frequently, many states face no serious external military v
threat. That means many armies have little prospect of going to war. They
specialize in internal control.
Third World militaries have drawn specifically on European or American
models, aid, and training to a far larger degree than European states intervened
in the formation of each other's aroties. In Latin America, for example, before
. World War II France and Germany trained many of the officers of Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. After the war, the United States took over the
task (Nunn 1971). This external intervention gave Latin American militaries
exceptional maneuverability vis-a.-vis their potential rivals and chosen enemies.
In Europe, the external imposition of state occurred without obvious
impact on the stability of regimes. Most of the states formed out of the ruins of
the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had, it is true, unsteadier holds on
stable democracy than their northern neighbors, and one might argue ..
connection between late national state formation and v,ulnerability to fascism in
Germany and Italy. But in northern Europe, the late independence of Finland,
Norway, and the Baltic republics did not stop them from establishing relatively
durable regimes (see Alapuro 19 88).
In the world since 1945, however, the relationship between external
imposition and instability seems to have increased. Where the ability of rulers to
.draw revenues from commodity exports or from great-power 'military aid has
208 Soldiers and Stales in 1990 Soldiers and States in 1990 209
allowed them to bypass bargaining with their subject populations, large state
edifices have grown up in the absence of significant consent or support from MILITARY BUILDUP
citizens. Lacking strong ties between particular state institutions and major
social classes within the population, those states have become more vulnerable The military investments of the world's states are increasing apace. After the
to forcible seizures of power and abrupt changes in the form of government. demobilization following World War lJ, military expenditure has risen
Among the world's poorer states that were already independent in t955, for dramatically on a per capita basis, especially in the Third World. Between 1960
example, higher shares of government expenditure in Gross National Product and 1987, with corrections for inflation, per capita military spending increased
(arguably an outcome of external influence) predicted more frequent regime by almost 'So percent, while GNP per capita rose about 60 percent (Sivard
changes during the next two decades, just as more frequent regime changes 1988 : 6). In the world's richer countries, however, military budgets actually
between '950 and 196o predict higher shares of government expenditure in the declined from about 6.9 percent of GNP in 1960 to about 5.5 percent in 1984;
subsequent fifteen years (Thomas and Meyer 1980). These circumstances in poorer countries, the percentage has risen from 3.6 to 5.6 percent; the poor
invite military buildup, and military bids for power. world is now spending a larger share of irs meager income on arms and armies
Most likely the relationship between external influence and political than the rich world spends of its much more ample income. ("Rich countries"
instability is curvilinear, with instability highest at intermediate and/or changing include Australia, Ausoia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark,
levels of external control. That between external influence and military control, East Germany, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, japan,
on the other hand, is quite direct. The extreme form of external influence is Luxemburg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Rumania, Spain,
military occupation; as long as it lasts, the occupied regime tends to stay in Sweden, Switzerland, the USSR, the United Kingdom, the United States, and ,
place. World War" differed from previous general wars by not ending in a West Germany. "Poor countries" include all other states.)
general settlement; it left military occupations in Germany, Austria, japan, World regions vary considerably in their devotion to military expenditure.
Korea, and elsewhere to drag on for years. During the postwar years, the great Table 7.2 provides details. In per capita expenditures for '984, the world's
Western powers - incomparably, the USSR and the USA - maintained leading spenders were North America, the Warsaw Pact countries and the
unprecedented numbers of troops abroad. In 1987, 29 states officially stationed Middle East, while in proportion of GNP spent on ti,e military the Middle East
troops within some other state's territory. The USA had 250,000 troops in left the rest of the world far behind. The champions in this dubious contest
West Germany, 54,000 in japan and 43,000 in South Korea, while the Soviet were Iraq, with an estimated 38.5 percent of GNP devoted to military activity,
Union deployed 380,000 in East Germany, 110,000 in Afghanistan, 65,000 in Oman, with 27.9 percent, Israel, with 24.4 percent, Saudi Arabia, with 22
Hungary, and 60,000 in Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union led the occupiers: percent, North and South Yemen, with 16.9 and ;'5.1 percent, Syria, with 14.9
USSR: 73°,°9° troops abroad
Table 7.2 Military expenditure and mililary power in world regions, 197 2-86
USA: 492,500
Vietnam: 19°,000 Mililary expenditurc Military expcnse as Pcrcent ofsrates under
United Kingdom: 89,5°0 Region per capila (US$) percent of GNP military control
Fran,e: 84,45°
'972 1978 1984 '972 1978 '984 1978 198) '986
Cuba: 29,250 North America 346 4 68 935 6·3 4·9 6.1 0.0 0.0 0.0
Latin America 22
The surprises arc Vietnam (with an estimated 14°,000 troops in Cambodia and NATO Europe "
'08 237
3I
,80
1.9
3·8
1.5
3·6
1.6
3·8
54. 2 54. 2 37·5
7. 1
Warsaw Pacl 7·' 7·'
204 3 11 63 1 9. 0 8.2 9. 6 0.0
another 5°,000 in Laos) and Cuba (with 27,000 in Angola and 9ther forces Other Europe 56 121 181 2.8
14·3 14·3
2·3 2·4 0.0 0.0 0.0
scattered in Congo, Nicaragua, and Yemen: Sivard 1988: 12-13). Although Middle Easl 55 25 0 44 1 12.2 12.2 17-9 25.0 )7.5 )7.5
dominant states, sometimes sent tfOOPS in to forestall or reverse transfers of Soulh Asia 4 5 9 4. 0 2.8 )·5 50.0 50.0 5°·0
Far Easl 12 30 )4 J.3 2·7 2.8 62·5
power, on the whole their presence greatly reduced the odds for further 62·5 5 6 .2
Oceania 98 156 27 6 ).' 2·4 ).0 0.0 0.0 0.0
changes of regime. Africa 7 22 )0 ).0 ).6 J.9 52.) 51.1 64-4
World 58 97 161 5-4 )8.)
4·5 5·6 40.1 4 0 .8
. Source: RUlh Leger Sivllrd, World MiliMlJ' (/lid Sodal Expel/dill/res, 1974, 1981, J983 and 19 88
edilions
210 Soldiers and States in 1990
percent, and Iran, with 14.6 percent; only at that point does the list break out of
thc Middle East to reach Angola, the USSR, Mongolia, Libya, Nicaragua, and
Ethiopia. Examining 60 Third World countries in 1960, 1970, and 1980, Su-
Hoon Lee found that the strongest predictors of rising military expenditure
were, first, involvement in interstate wars and! second, dependence on foreign
trade (Lee 1988: 95-11 I). The finding underscores the vulnerable positions of
Middle Eastern states, where oil and warfare cross.
Similarly, armed forces have remained fairly constant in number throughout
the rich parts of the world since 196o even if expenditure per soldier, sailor or
airman has skyrocketed, while in poorer countries troops have roughly doubled
in number since 1960 (Sivard 1986: 32). In 1960,0.61 percent of the world's
population served in the military; by 1984, the figure had declined slightly to
0.57. In poor countries, however, the proportion had risen from 0·39 to 0.45;
the richer countries still have higher proportions of troops under arms, bUI
those proportions are dropping while the poorer countries creep up. Between
1964 and 1984, for example, Guyana's military forces (excluding police) rose
from 0.1 to 1.8 percent of the entire population (calculated from Danns
1986: 113-14); similar expansions occurred elsewhere as former colonies
moved from the rudimentary forces of order left by the departing imperial
powers to their own full-fledged armies, militias, and navies. The Middle East
now leads the world in proportion of military to civilian population, followed by
the Warsaw Pact countries and North America. The individual champions
include Vietnam (2.1 percent), Iran (2.4), Syria (2.7), Iraq (3.5), and Israel
(4.3); 4·3 percent means one person in twenty-three, including women, men,
and children. Such a level approaches the intense militarization of Sweden in
the early seventeenth century.
The world pattern of arms flows, moreover, has shifted significantly over the
last quarter-century. The sheer volume of exports has expanded rapidly,
multiplying from about $2.5 billion in 1960 to $37.3 billion in 1983 (Sivard
1986: 32). Spurred by great power military aid, arms are flowing increasingly to
the Third World. From a system in which major shipments of arms went chiefly
from one part of the Western world to another has evolved a system in which
rich countries export to poor countries. In 1965, the poorer parts of the world
were receiving about 55 percent of all international arms shipments; by 1983,
the proportion was 77 percent. (True, Brazil and Israel were then beginning to
compete actively in the world arms market, and Argentina was beginning to
build a-serious arms industry of its own, but none of them had yet challenged
the arms-sale dominance of the United States, the Soviet Union, France, or
Britain.) At that point, Middle Eastern countries were importing some $106
worth of arms per capita each year, as compared with S19 in Oceania, and
$Il in NATO Europe. In fact, Middle Eastern states, many of could
pay with oil, were receiving about half of all arms shipped to the Third
World.
SoMiers and Slates in '990 211
Yet the Middle East was not alone in buying war. Richard Tanter sums up
for the rest of Asia:
There is no other part of the earth which has experienced greater suffering from
organized violence: of the J o.7 miIJion people throughout the world who died from war-
related Causes between 1960 and 1982, almost halfwere Asian. Even after the end ofrhe
second Indochina war in 1975. armaments arc still flowing into the region, and at levels
as high as, or usually higher than before. Moreover, military governments in Asia have
become the norm rather than the exception, and they have achieved a greater
penetration of the social fabric than in earlier times. The weapon systems imported into ,
the region from the industrialized producers and me increasing number of domestically
produced sophisticated weapons are of ever greater destructive capability.
. (Tanler J984: 161)
Between 197 2 and 198 1, among all Asian states Outside the Middle East, only
Burma's military expenditure, in constant dolJars, declined; military spending
increased by at least half, in constant dollars, in the two Koreas, Taiwan,
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and
Bangladesh. In Asia and elsewhere, the scale of military activity is increasing
along almost every dimension. ,
SOLDIERS IN POWER
With growing military establishments, is the process of civiliani2ation that
European experience might lead us to expect continuing? We have some
indications that it is not. Suppose we calJ "military control" the presence of any \
of these: key political leadership by military officers, existence of martial law,
extrajudicial authority exercised by security forces, lack of central political
control over the armed forces, or occupation by foreign military forces (Sivard
8
19 6: 24; for a mOre sophisticated set of criteria, but also one that is harder to
apply empirically, see Stepan 1988, 93-127). The absence of all of these
eJements constitutes civilian control of the statei civilianization OCCurs when any
of these happens:
decline in political leadership by military officers;
end of martial law;
curbing of security forces' extrajudicial authority;
increase of centralized control Over armed forces;
end of occupation by foreign military forces.
In the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Arab Republic
of Yemen meet the test of military control; in Latin America, Chile, Colombia,
El Salvador, GuatemaJa, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, ParaguaYi in
Europe, Turkey and perhaps Poland alone. As the lists show, the criteria
 212 Soldiers and S,ates in 1990
include a number of states that do not have military government in the strict
sense of the term, and rest on debatable judgments about the power and
autonomy of the armed forces. In Guatemala, for example, an elected civilian
government has nominally ruled since 1985. At the Indian center of Neba;,
however, a religious worker told Stephen Kinzer: ((There is a mayor here, there
are councilors, and there is a legal apparatus. Blit there is never any doubt that
the army has precedence. No one who is elected here has authority over anyone
in uniform. Elections have no impact here" (Kinzer 1989: 34). Most of the
Latin American instances fall into this gray zone: formal democracy, military
power. If we tightened the standards, however, the trends and regional
distributions of military states would not change substantially.
The tcrm "military control," to be sure l applies to many different kinds of
regimes. Thomas Callaghy denies that Zaire, despite being led by General
Mobutu, lives under military rule. I-Ie claims that ditTerences between military
and civilian heads of state maner little as compared to the common properties
of the "authoritarian, organic-statist administrative state drawing heavily on a
centralist and corporatist colonial tradition that is held together, often loosely
and in an unstable fashion, by strong personalistic rulership" that is becoming a
major African type (Callaghy 1984: 45). Yet he concedes that military men have
exceptional opportunities to seize power in Africa. "These distinctly early
modern, weakly institutionalized military forces," he reports, "are, however,
relaliveb' powerful in the African context of early modern states and societies"
(Callaghy 1984: 44). Thus in Africa as elsewhere in the Third World military
expansion seems to promote rather than deter military rule. The process is not
proceeding as it did in Europe.
By the standards I laid down eatlier, about 40 percent of the world's states
now live under military control, and the proportion is slowly rising. Variations
from region to region arc dramatic: in Latin America about 38 percent of all
governments are military, and this proportion declining (after a rapid rise in the
1960s and early 1970S); 38 percent in the Middle East, up from 25 percent in
the 1970s; a stable 50 percent in South Asia, a mildly fluctuating 60 percent in
the Far East, 64 percent and rising in Africa. Military control, of one variety or
another, has become the form of government in much of the Third
World, notably in South Asia, East Asia, and Africa. The proportion of states
under military control in a region correlates with the recency of decolonization
. in that region. Many recent states have known little but military rule since they
gained, or regained, their sovereignty. Ghanaians have now lived under military
control for 18 of their 30 years of independence, and have experienced four
major coups in the process.
Not aU military states, however, are new states. Most Latin American states,
including those governed by soldiers, have existed as formally independent
units since the carly nineteenth centuryj in fact, they antedate the majority of
European states. Again, old Thailand provides a textbook case of military rule.
Soldiers ami Slales ill 1990 213
Siam, as it then was called, stood out in the '930S for its military government.
The military overthrew the monarchy in 1932, and have run the state most of
the time since then. Of the 50 years from 1932 to '982, military officers served
as prime ministers for 4 I; during that time Siam/Thailand went through nine ,
successful coups and seven more abortive oneSj the coups and coup attempts
concentrate disproportionately in the period since 1945 (Chin wan no 1985:
I '4-15). With generous assistance from the United States, the Thai military
have built lip their strength in the name of anti-communism. Between '972 and
1982 the armed forces increased from about 30,000 to about 233,000 - a ,
sevenfold expansion - not including an estimated 500,000 reserves and
600,000 paramilitary forces (Chinwanno 1985: 115). The forces run numerous
rural development programs and promote the formation of paramilitary groups
to combat Communist guerrillas.
Once the Thais were unusual. But by now, many other states have caught up
with Thailand. Using criteria similar to Rutll Sivard's, Talukder Manirllzzaman
(1987' 22 I -2) has calculated for 61 Third World states the proportion of all
years of inqependence between 1946 and 1984 during which they had military
government. The leaders run as follows:
80-/00 percelll: ChinalTaiwan, Thailand, EI Salvador, Nicaragua, Algeria,
Egypt, Za'ire, Burundi, Syria
60-79 percelll: Paraguay, Slidan, Upper Volta, Argentina, Benin, Central
African Republic, Togo, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Iraq, People's
Republic of Congo, Mali, Burma, Republic of Korea, Brazil, Somalia,
Bangladesh, Yemen Arab Republic
40-59 percelll: Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Ghana, Indonesia, Grenada, Honduras,
Madagascar, Bolivia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Libya, Kampuchea, Suri-
name, Niger
Maniruzzaman has omitted such cases as Haiti, where the Duvalier family not
only assumed military titles but also used public and private armies to terrorize
the civilian population; he therefore underestimates the prevalence of military
control. The average Third World state has spent more than half its years of
independence since 1946 in the hands of soldiers.
As military control rose, the frequency of coups d'etat rose in the Third
World. Figure 7.2 conveys the main messages: an increase from eight or ten
anempted military coups, about half of tllem successful, somewhere in the
world during the 1940S to about double the number, and similar success rates,
during the 1970s. Unlike civil wars, coups usually occurred without manifest
involvement of outside powers. Over the forty years, foreign powers intervened
to promote about 7 percent of all coup attempts, and to deter another 4 percent
(David t987: 1-2). The figures mean, of course, that almost 90 percent of the
world's coups_occurred mitlt01l1 substantial foreign intervention.
2/4 Soldiers and States in 1990
Soldim and States ill 1990 2/5
26 60
24- Key 0 Attempts
22
20
• Successes
50 ,
18
0. 81 40
g 16
u
a 14 o
.8 12 30 ,
§ 10
E
z 8 20
<
6
4 10
2
1943
( I I I II i i I
1948 1953
j II i i i i i i i j i i i i j i , l r
1958 1963 1968
j
1973
iii I iIi i i r
1978 1983
j i ,\ i
1988
I , , ,
1944
t ,
1949
r r, , , , ,
1954
I,1959
iii I I I
1964
f iIi iii
1969
iii ii' iii iii, , i \
1974 1979 1989
i
\
Figure 7,2 Mirrtary coups, 1944-87. Figure 7.4 Coup attempts per 100 states, Africa 1944-87.
Goups multiplied in part because independent states multiplied. Figure 7.3, afterward. Figures 7.4 to 7.6 specifY what was happening: in Latin America, the
which compares the numbers of attempted and successful coups to the number Middle East, and Asia, coups swung wildly around an average of one each year
of UN members year by year, shows that the per-state frequencies ran higher for every three states until about J 964, then settled down to one each year per
before the entry of numerous Asian and African states in the 1960s lhan five or ten states after that. In Africa, however, coups rose in frequency from
none whatsoever during the period of continued European control to higher
35
60
30,
" Key o Attempts
• Successes
50
25--' II
"
N
(J) 20 .s 40
0
0
0
'"
<;;
0
15 ';;; 30
5
()
li
E
10
20
<
5
10
o I iii I I I I I i I I I I Iii 1 iii iii iii i i i Iii j iii iii i
1943 1948 .-
..53 1958 1963 1968 1973 1978 1983 O+rlililililiiliiiii
1944 1949 1954 1959
Ii
--
,"64
IViii
1969 1974 1979
"Viii
1984
Figure 7.3 Coups per JOO states, 1944-87. Figure 7.5 Coup attempts per 100 states, Latin America '944-87-
 216 Soldiers and States in 1990 Soldiers 01111 States ill 1990 217
60 decline in the frequency of military coups (itsclf the result of the installation of
relatively stable military regimes) that began in the '960s. Latin America has
gone through three stages since World War II: a period of constant struggles for
50
state power, resulting in a net increase in militarization (1945 to early 1 960s); a
period of relatively stable military rule (1960s to late 1970S); and a period of
!!g 40 partial reduction in military power (since 1980). Given repeated premature
announcements of civilianization in Latin America, we can have no confidence
o
;' 30 that the reversal since 1980 will continue (Rouquie 1987: 2-3). States in Asia,
"'
15.
E
Africa, and the Middle East, in any case, appeat to have settled into more stable
forms of military rule; so far the decline in coup frequencies docs not bespeak
20 liberation from military control.
Third World states have, then, militarized extensively since World War II;
10 with the exception of Latin America, we have no strong signs that the trend is
reversing, and a process of civilianization setting in. If so, the world has
something to worry about: not only because it means our old ideas about the
o II + i I I I I I f iii iii i i i i i i i I I I I j i I I I I I I I I iii i VI iii "maturing" of national states with experience are wrong, not only because of the
1944 1949 1954 1959 1964 1969 1974 1979 1984
risk that a war in the Third World will involve nuclear arms or lead to a great
Figure 7.6 Coup attempts per 100 SlateS l Asia and Middle East 1944-87. power confrontation, but also because military control and state violence
against citizens go hand in hand.
frequencies of coups per Slate than clsewhere in the Third World from 1959 Consider official violence against citizens, in the form of torture, brutality,
onward. This does not mean, however, that the rising frequency of coups is a kidnappings, and political killings. In the Third World as a whole, according to
statistical mirage. On the contrary: it means that the states entering the United Ruth Sivard's ratings, half of all military-controlled states "frequently"
Nations after 1960 were disproportionately vulnerable to military coups. employed violence against their citizens, while only a fifth of non-military states
Unsurprisingly, the geography of coups corresponds to the geography of did so. The differences are stronger in Latin America, the Middle East, and the
military rule. From-198o through 1987, the world's coup attempts occurred in Far East than in South Asia and Africa. restrictions. on the right to
Spain, North Yemen, South Yemen, Egypt, Bahrein, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, vote are -significantly more common in military than in non-military Third
Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, North Korea, Bolivia, World states. The relationship, furthermore, looks like cause and effect: when
Suriname, Argentina, Haiti, Guatemala, Panama, Grenada, Sudan, Mauritania, the military gain power, civil and human rights ("il. Anyone who values political
Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Gambia, Central African Republic, Seychelles, representation and the protection of citizens against abuses of state power
Ghana, Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Kenya, Upper Volta, Tanzania, Togo, should worry about world-wide militarization.
Swaziland, Cameroons, Niger, Lesotho, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau, the Comores,
Guinea, and Uganda; military insurgents actually seized power in South
Yemen, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Argentina, Suriname, Guatemala, Bolivia, HOW OlD THE MILITARY GAIN POWER?
Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Central African Republic, Ghana, Chad, Upper
.volta, Nigeria, and Guinea - a disproportionate concentration of coups, and If, after centuries of civilianization in the European state system, the states that
especially of attempts, in Africa. have joined the system recently are moving toward military rule, what might
Whether the apparent fall-orrin attempts and successes after 1980 represents explain the shift? Let us be clear: given the variety of Third World states, no
a definitive change still remains to be seen. So far the net effect of changes since single explanation will account in detail for the rise of military power in each
World War II has been a massive increase in the share of the world's independent country. For sub-Saharan Africa, Samuel Decalo denies that the strength and
l states controlled more or less directly by military men. Maniruzzaman's counts coherence of the military has anything to do with their great propensity to bid
f'show that returns from military to civilian rule were fewer than military coups in for national power; on the contrary, he argues, ((many African armies [consist
every interval from 1946 to 1981, and that they balanced at six each in 1982-4. of] a coterie of distinct armed camps owing primarily clientelistic allegiance to a
In Latin America, a shift to civilian control of states seems to be following the handful of mutually competitive officers of different ranks seething with a

218 Soldiers a"d States ill [990
variety of corporate, ethnic and personal grievances" (Decalo 1976: 14-15),
with internal competition driving them to attempt coups, while Maxwell Owusu
(1989) inserts Ghana's post-independence coups in a long tradition of populist
rebellions against unworthy chiefs. Ruth Collier points out, however, that the
African military seized power more often in states where one faction imposed
one-party rule on others, or a multi-party system representing numerous
ethnicities appeared at independence than where one-party dominance grew up
through electoral successes prior to independence (Collier 1982: 95-117). The
coexistence of multiple patron-client chains and ethnic fragmentation apparently
makes African states vulnerable to military power, but within the limits set by
national coalitions and parties.
In any case, such an explanation holds less weight in much of South Asia,
Latin America, and the Middle East. Concerning Latin America, according to
J. Samuel Fitch:
A growing consensus has emerged regarding the preconditions for military coups.
Coups occur when military officers believe a crisis situation exists. Public disorders and
public opinion hostile to the government, threats to the military's institutional interests,
violations of the constitution by civilian presidents, evident inability of the incumbent
administration to manage a serious economic crisis, or a significant "Communist threat"
will increase the military's sense of crisis. Personal ambitions and personal ties may
influence individual officers, but the decision to stage a military coup is generally an
institutional decision, reflecting the collective evaluation of government performance
within the upper ranks of the armed forces as a whole.
(F;,ch 1986: 27-8)
On a world scale, then, we can only hope to identilY conditions that made
military power easier or more probable before turning to the particular histories
of statcs and regions for the examination of precise paths to military hegemony.
Three main possibilities come to mind.
First, civilian-dominated institutions might be failing with sufficient frequency
in the Third World that the military take over by default. Twenty-five years ago,
Western political analysts who noticed the increased intervention of armics in
Third World civilian politics leaned toward that explanation.
S"o"d, the disproportionate support that outsidc powers give to Third World
military organizations might be lending those organizations extra strength vis-a-
vis their competitors within their own states. Radical critics of American military
assistance programs often articulate that explanation.
Third, the process of negotiation and containment of the military that
os:curred widely in the West may not be occurring, because states acquire their
military means from great powers outside the state, in return for commodities
or political subordination. Or all three could be happening at once.
,
Soldiers alld States ill [990 z 19
We lack reliable evidence on which of the three is occurring. A careful analysis
of military intervention in politics within 35 African statcs between 1960 and
1982 indicatcs that these factors promoted intervention:
domination of the army by a single ethnic group;
high military expenditure combined with frequent sanctions against govern-
ment opponents;
absence of political pluralism;
low electoral turnout before independence;
low proportion of thc population in agriculture;
rapid increase in the population of the capital city;
slow increase in industrial jobs and in GNP;
low proportion of exports to GNP;
decreasingly diversified commodity exports.
(Johnson, Slater and McGowan 1984: 635)
Despite the miscellaneous character that infects many such statistical searches
for causes, the list sounds some recurrent themes. More than anything else, it
portrays a combination of military'autonomy and economic crisis as favorable to
military involvement. The authors themselves conclude that "social mobilization"
favors military intervention and "political participation" works against it. "It
would appear," they remark, "that in states where influentials have internalized
the rules of the capitalist world economy and thereby coped relatively well with
the very harsh international cconomic environment of the last to ycars, these
states lessened their peripherality to a degree, strengrhened their civilian
structures somewhat, and experienced less military interventionism than states
whose influentials have not coped as well" (Johnson, Slater and McGowan
1984: 636). Although each of these factors deserves discussion in its own right,
none of them sheds much light on the historical process by which states become
more or less vulnerable to military takeovers.
Let us bc clear. Characteristic schisms within states vary fundamcntally from
one world region to another, and the actual alliances between ambitious military
men and groups within the civilian population vary accordingly. Ethnic
cleavages matter a great dcal in contemporary African and South Asian states,
but much less so within contemporary Latin American states. Religious
divisions, within and outside Islam, enter most major conflicts in the Middle
East. Where military rule already prevailS, furthermore, competition within the
armed forces themselves frcquently produces bids for state power. Argentina's
attempted coup of 15 April 1987 and thereafter represented one segment of the
army's resistance to prosecution for human rights violations under the
 220 Soldiers a./ltl Slales ill 1990
preceding military dictatorship (Bigo et al. 1988: 56-7), Fiji's coup of 14 May
1987 occurred "expressly to protect the special interests of Fiji's indigenous
Fijian community" against the electoral power of the islands' Indian near-
majority (Kelly 1988: 399), and Burundi's coup of 3 September 1987 pitted one
army faction against another (Bigo et a1. 1988: 65). At this level, every military
regime and every attempted military seizure of state power depends on local
social strucrure and previous history. If we can't explain the courses of
particular military regimes without particular histories, however, we can still
reasonably ask whether some world-wide changes since 1945 have made
military bids for power more feasible and attractive throughout the world, and
therefore help explain the world-wide increase in military regimes.
So far we don't know if any of the three hypothetical processes - failure of
civilian institutions, external support for the military, minimization of negotiations
between state and citizens - is really occurring in the contemporary world. We
should be finding out. But contrasts between the recent experiences of Third
World states and the conditions that civilianized Europe suggest an important
speculation about what mighl be happening in Africa, the Middle East, and
much of Asia. Here is the speculation: the creation of a bipolar, then incipiently
tripolar world system of states since World War II has intensified the
competition among great powers for the allegiance of Third World states, and
the tendency to leave no part of the Third World neutral. That competition
induces the great powers, especially the United States and the Soviet Union, to
provide arms, military training, and military advice to many states.
In return, the great powers, or major interests within theID, receive
commodities such 3S oil, political support in the world arena and, sometimes,
profits from the sale of arms. In those states, military organizations grow in size,
strength, and efficacy while other organizations stand still or wither. The
relative viability of military organizations makes them attractive to ambitious but
impecunious young men, so the military divert talent from business, education,
and civilian public administration. The military thus find it easier and easier to
seize control of the state, and civilian rulers find it more and more difficult to
check them. One form or another of pretorianism - oligarchical, radical, or
mass, to usc Samuel Huntington's labels - emerges. Militarization prevails.
Is the speculation credible? The experience of countries for which we have
detailed postwar political histories give it some support. Extreme cases inelude
Taiwan and the two Koreas, where the massive support of foreign powers for
the local military produced steely control of the national economics, until the
very success of economic expansion began to undertnine military hegemony
(Amsden 1985, Cumings 1984, 1988, Deyo, Haggard and Koo 1987, Hamilton
1986). In Korea, for example, Park Chung-Hee, a former officer in the
japanese occupation army, seized power in 1961. Park deliberately set out to
establish a Japanese-style "rich country and powerful military" (Launius
1985: 2). He was able to do so for two main reasons: because Korea had lived
Soldiers alld Slales ill 1990 221
from 1907 to 1945 as a tightly-controlled japanese colony, whose Korean
officials had easily moved into positions of power within the new regime, and
because the American occupying army - which remains in Korea today _
backed the plan, and participated in the containment of opposing workers and
students.
The revolutionary redistribution of land that occurred when North Korea
occupied South Korea during the summer of 1950 had liquidated landlords as
another possible source of opposition to military hegemony (Cumings 198 9:
12). Although South Korea has gone through several brief periods of nominal
democracy under American auspices, the 1961 coup d'etat put the military
definitely in the saddle. Under military control and American sponsorship,
South Korea built a low-wage, export-oriented economy aimed especially at
japanese and American markets. In similar ways, although with less economic
,
success, the Soviet Union has maintained a military presence and supervision in
such satellites as the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, and Czecho-
slOVtlkia.
Except possibly for Panama, Cuba, and Honduras, direct foreign control of
the national military, and thus of the state, docs not approach East Asian
extremes in Latin America. Latin American states have sustained their O\v-n
strong tradition of military intervention in politics since they wrenched
themselves independent of Spain and Portugal almost two centuries ago.
Durable political regimes, however, became more prevalent during the 1960S
and 1970s. They took two rather different forms: the personalistic, c1ientelistic
rule of a Stroessner in Paraguay or a Somoza in Nicaragua, and the
"institutional" control by the military that prevailed in post-Peron Argentina
and post-Vargas Brazil. .
For some time before the 1960s the United States had held many Caribbean
and Central American states in "military rutclage," feeling free to send the US
Marines to maintain or restore regimes it preferred '(Rouquie 1987: 117-28).
Up to that point, however, neither American capital nor American military aid
extended very deeply into the rest of Latin America. The very frequent South
American coups d'etat attracted little direct US intervention. With the Cuban
revolution and incipient Soviet-Cuban cooperation, the Kennedy administration
began to redefine its Latin American policy; beginning in 1962, American
military aid
became more intensive and better institutionalized than before. American military
planning became more structured and the relations berween the Larin American armies
. and that of the metropole grew closer. The U.S. Army had military missions of varying
importance in nineleen countries of the subcontinent and their presence was ofren an
integral part of the agreements for the sale or loan of military equipment.
(Rouquic 1987: 132)
American military aid to Latin America rose from about $40 million per year in
1953-63 to about $125 million per year in 1964-7 (Rouquie 1987: 131). That
222 Soldiers and Slales in 1990
presence helped reduce the frequency of military seizures of power in Latin
America by reinforcing those military regimes that already held power. Not
until the end of the 1970s, when the United States began to withdraw its
support for resident militaries, did a minor trend toward civilianization set
in.
Brazil is an obvious case in point. Although the military had hovered over
civilian politics from the army's overthrow of the Brazilian Empire in 1889, it
did not seize direct, durable control over the state until the "April Revolution"
of 1964. But then military-dominated regimes opened Brazil to American
capital, American military aid, and Brazilian-American cooperation in the Cold
War. Military control continued to 1985. In 1982 regional elections, opposition
leaders took key provincial governorships, and in 1984 a moderate opponent of
military power, Tancredo Neves, won the Brazilian presidency. Demilitarization
began, but with significant compensating gains for the military: an expanding
domestic arms industry, and an increase in the national military budget. The
United States did not intervene directly in Brazilian civilianization, but its
increased concern for human rights and its decreased readiness to prop up
declining militaries surely helped set the stage.
Neighboring Suriname arrived at military rule within five years of its
independence from the Netherlands, but its soldiers declared themselves
socialists (Sedoc-Dahlberg 1986). From independence in '975 to the mililary
coup of 1980, Suriname's three major political parties represented its dominant
ethnic groups: Hindustani, Creole, and Javanese. But when a force of 600
troops led by sergeants seized control of the state after a series oflabor disputes
within the army, the new government began receiving substantial aid from
Cuba, and aligning its politics with Cuba's. At the same time the military
expanded their numbers, organizing a People's Militia of some 3,000 troops for
internal control, and maintaining about 1.4 percent of the entire population
under arms, more than three times the world average for low-income states.
Brazilian leaders, alarmed by the presence of a leftist state on their flank, began
an arrangement in 1983 by which "Suriname would sell rice and alumina to
Brazil in exchange for arms shipments sufficient to allow Suriname's army to
double in size," (Sedoc-Dahlberg 1986: 97), and Suriname would also
moderate its social policies. The combination of aid from Cuba and Brazil
served to increase the military's room for maneuver within Suriname, allowing
them to rule without a broad social base.
Libya followed yet another path to military rule (Anderson 1986: 25 1- 69).
Italian imperialism made a single territory of hostile and distinctly different
Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Sanusi leader Idris, who became king at
independence in 1951, drew support chiefly from Cyrenaica; his cooperation in
the Allied effort to oust Italy from North Africa gave him a decisive political
advantage over his Tripolitanian rivals. No well-defined national state emerged
in independent Libya. Instead, overlapping extended families governed t11rough
Soldirrs and States in /990 223
patronage. Oil revenues enriched them, allowed the construction of a measure
of infrastructure, and permitted the king and his satraps to rule without
building a substantial central bureaucracy. The small Royal Libyan Army
formed from units that had fought with the British in World War II, but were
overshadowed by provincial security forces drawn from tribal populations and
by the presence of American and British military bases. Despite the Anglo-
American presence, captain Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi led a successful coup
d'etat in 1969. Indeed, control over oil revenues made it possible for Qadhdhafi
to expel the British and Americans, root out most of the old rulers, Islamize and
Arabize the state, undertake a program of assistance to nascent revolutionary
regimes elsewhere, and yet to continue his predecessor's avoidance of bulky
central structure. The transformed state gingerly began a courtship with the
Soviet Union and a campaign of opposition to American power. A kind of
nationalism, then, bolstered a fragile state and justified military rule.
In South Korea, an American occupation directly shaped the postwar
state. In Brazil, changing American orientations toward Latin American
militaries conditioned political shifts but by no means governed the history of
military power. Libya moved to a military regime despite an American military
presence. Conditions and consequences of military power obviously vary
significantly from one part of the Third World to another. Great power
competition and intervention play no more than supporting parts in any
particular coup and in the maintenance of any particular military regime. But
alterations in relations of Third World states to great powers and to each other
seem to have contributed importantly to changes in the overall rhythms of
military control in the world as a whole. To that extent, the state system as such
has made a difference. . '
If great power confrontation and intervention in national militaries has the
influence this analysis gives it, one path toward civilianization seems clear. It
has two branches: either a reduction in the great power competition to build up
the military strength of the Third World states or an insulation of the target
states from that competition. It involves the promotion of bargaining between
the state's civilian institutions and the bulk of its citizens. The creation of
regular systems of taxation, equitably administered and responsive to the
citizenry, would probably speed the process. So would the opening of viable
career alternatives to military service. It is possible, as Alfred Stepan (1988: 84-5)
argues, that Brazil's mounting of a major arms export industry will have the
paradoxical effect of reducing the autonomy of its generals, and thus speeding a
kind of democracy through the accretion of civilian bureaucracies, vested
interests, and bargains with the civilian population; more generally (and, one
might hope, less belligerently), the growth of government involvement in
expanding production of goods and services is likely to promote civilianization.
Not by any means a recapitulation of the European experience; these days,
presumably, we can escape some of the cruelty of that experience. But yet a set
224 Soldiers alld States ill 1990
of opportunities that a sober reflection on European state formation makes a bit
less obscure.
ENVOI
To be sure, my trealment of these questions has peculiar overtones. It returns,
despite all my earlier protestations, to a form of intellectual colonialism, to the
presumption that jf European states worked their ways to civilianization of
public life, so could and should today's Third World states - if only they or
their patrons would let the European process unfold. It neglects the geopolitical
variation among regions that makes such a difference to military-civil relations:
the constant threat of direct American military intervention in Central America
or the Caribbean, the centrality of oil to many Middle Eastern economies, the
wide reach of South Africa within the states to its north, the industrial
expansion ofJapan, South Korea, and Taiwan as a factor in the politics of their
neighbors. It forgets ethnic fragmentation and strife as promoters of military
power. My attempt to place contemporary militarization in historical perspective
runs the risk of shining so bright a beam that it actually obscures its subject's
subtleties, wipes out its actual pattern of light and shade. My defense is simple:
we need to be aware that ti,e rise of military power in Third World states is not
simply a natural phase of state formation, one that previous experiencc tells us
will pass gradually as states maturc.
In any case, contemporary militarization is not the only important subject on
which the study of European state formation sheds light. The process deserves
attention for its own sake, simply because the formation of a European system
of national states profoundly affected the lives of all Westerners, and of most
non-Westerners as well. This book has, I hope, shown thc great contingency of
European state formation, indeed of the national state's ultimate triumph ovcr
other forms of political organization. Only the great sixteenth-century
expansion in the scale and expense of international wars (which was, to be surc,
an outcome of rivalries among European states as weU as their interaction with
Turks and Chinese) gave national states a definitive advantage over the
empires, city-states, and federations that prevailed in Europe up to that time.
Nor did Europeans follow a single path to the national state. As a function
of the relative predominance of concentrated capital and concentrated coercion
in different parts of the continent, three partly distinct patterns of \ransforma-
tion - coercion-intensive, capital-intensive, and capitalized-coercion - marked
out deeply different experiences for rulers, landlords, capitalists, workers,
and peasants alike. Along the way, most states that once existed disappeared,
and the rest linden-vent fundamental changes in form and action. In regions and
periods where capitalists hcld the upper hand, states commonly fragmented,
resisted centralization, and gave a large scope to formal institutions representing
their dominant classes. Before the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century growth
Soldiers IIltd States ill 1990 225
of huge citizen armies, such states mobilized easily for warfare (especially naval
warfare), yet created relatively little durable state structure as they did so.
Landlord-dominated regions, in contrast, more often produced bulky,
centralized states as the sheer effort of squeezing the means of war from
uncommercialized economies created extensive administrations and far-
reaching compacts between rulers and their landed allics. At the extreme, as in
the case of Poland over four or five centuries, the weight ot landlords swamped
royal power and promoted immobility or collapse.
In between the capital-intensive and coercion-intensive paths of state formation,
a more even balance of capital and coercion guaranteed class struggle, but in a few
-
cases such as France and Great Britain opened tile way to fornlation of a national
state having the capacity to create and sustain massive armed force. Those few
survivors set ti,e standard of war for all other states, playing disproportionate
parts in the imposition of the European state system, and the European variety
of national state, on the rest of the world. Since World War II, the once-
European system of national states has claimed control over the entire earth.
Because the system originated in Europe, the close examination of European
history helps us understand the origins, character, and limits of the
contemporary world system. ..
How long will the system last? We see some signs that the era of formally
autonomous states is passing: the stalemate of the United Nations, the
displacement of rapidly shifting alliances by durable military-economic blocs,
the formation of market-linked ensembles such as the EEC and COMECON,
the internationalization of capital, the rise of corporations whose capital is
everywhere and nowhere, demands for autonomy and nationality within existing
states that could eventually reduce them to of the former cake, the shift
toward internal concerns by the United States and the Soviet Union, the
activation of nationalities within the USSR, the achievement of substantial
world power by an essentially demilitarized state - Japan - the promise or threat
that China will extend its enormous organizational, demographic, and
ideological power into the rest of the world. The state system Europeans
fashioned has not always existed. It will not endure forever.
Its obituary will be hard to write. On one side, we see the pacification of
European civil life and the fashioning of more or less representative political
institutions, both by-products of a state formation driven by the pursuit of
military might. On the other side, we notice the rising destructiveness of war,
the pervasive intervention of states in individual lives, the creation of
incomparable instruments of class control. Destroy the state, and create
Lebanon. Fortify it, and create Korea. Until other forms displace the national
state, neither alternative will do. The only real answer is to turn the immense
power of national states away from war and toward the creation of justice,
personal security, and democracy. My inquiry has not shown how to accomplish
that gigantic task. It has, however, shown why the task is urgent.